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Thursday, February 17, 2011

Students, please find below a draft of a classification paper that follows Option 2, as discussed during class. As with the earlier sample definition paper, keep in mind that it is a draft and not a finished work. Note also that the genre, progressive rock, remains unavailable to you, and that, again, my prewriting has come from some thought and classroom examples.

As with the Option 1 example, this paper is the bare minimum allowable length for your assignment.

Progressive rock is a genre of music typified by songs longer than the usual length for rock, intellectualized lyrics, orchestral instrumentation, and unusual-for-rock rhythmic constructions. Kansas is recognized as one of the major bands to work in the genre, and so the band's "Point of Know Return" is often thought of as belonging to the genre. Such a thought is incorrect.

"Point of Know Return" is not long enough a song to truly qualify as progressive rock. Most progressive rock songs run between six and ten minutes. "Point of Know Return" is just over three minutes in length, solidly within the range of most rock music but far, far short of that common for progressive rock.

Intellectually, the song also falls short of the mark established by progressive rock. Most of the lines in the lyrics function as tetrameter, generally iambic. Iambic tetrameter is traditionally employed in light verse or in works of ridicule. In neither case is it closely associated with higher intellectual faculties; rather the opposite is true, as evidenced by the traditional "Thirty days hath September." Additionally, the lyrics contain a persistent usage error. The dominant American English of the time the song was released calls for the use of "who" or "whom" when referencing a person of uncertain identity. The lyrics repeatedly ask "Was it you that said" [emphasis mine], using the pronoun appropriate for an inanimate object or non-human animal rather than that fitting for human application. That it does so not just once but thrice marks the mistake as more than simply an incidental error, representing a distinctly anti-intellectual attitude far removed from that for which progressive rock calls.

Only in instrumentation does "Point of Know Return" meaningfully approach progressive rock. As with many of Kansas' songs, the sibilant strains of a violin playing are presented in the song. The violin is also featured in a brief solo between the second and third verses. It also sings forth in arpeggiated flourishes surrounding the repeated refrain "How long to the point of know return?" In those flourishes, though, the violin is accompanied by and blends fluidly with electric organ, an instrument not seldom employed in the rock music of the 1970s. Thus, even in presenting an orchestral instrument, the song integrates it with mainstream rock, frustrating the identification of "Point of Know Return" as progressive rock.

The rhythmic construction of the song also inhibits the classification of "Point of Know Return" as progressive rock. Typically, progressive rock songs will shift meter, with the shifts occurring frequently and among unusual time signatures. Measures in five, seven, and eleven are not uncommon. While it is true that "Point of Know Return" shifts meter, it only does so between the common-to-rock four and the not uncommon three. Additionally, the shits occur only in predictable places at the end of the second and fourth lines of verses 1, 2, and 4--the third verse serves as a sort of refrain, which is hardly unusual of rock music. Even during the violin solo, during which time shifts in time signature would be easily negotiated, the meter remains in four. As such, "Point of Know Return" is remarkably consistent to the common-to-rock four-beat measure, and so scarcely meets the rhythmic qualifications to be progressive rock.

To call "Point of Know Return" progressive rock is to misidentify it entirely. This is not to say that Kansas is a bad band. There is nothing wrong with the song itself, and Kansas has released many fine works. Instead, the problem is with the way in which "Point of Know Return" is classified. Because Kansas has done so much progressive rock so very well, almost every song the band has released is regarded as being progressive rock. This fosters (and possibly results from) paying insufficient attention to each song individually, which precludes judging each on its individual merits. As such, it is lazy listening, and, like all laziness, is to be avoided.

Students, please find below a draft of a classification paper that follows Option 1, as discussed during class. As with the earlier sample definition paper, keep in mind that it is a draft and not a finished work. Note also that the genre, progressive rock, remains unavailable to you, and that, again, my prewriting has come from some thought and classroom examples.

One last note: this example is the bare minimum allowable length for your papers.

Progressive rock is a genre of music typified by songs longer than the usual length for rock, intellectualized lyrics, orchestral instrumentation, and unusual-for-rock rhythmic constructions. "Stairway to Heaven" is typically considered hard rock, given the association of the band that played it, Led Zeppelin, with that genre. Even so, the song is actually an example of progressive rock.

The length of the song marks "Stairway to Heaven" as progressive rock. Most rock, hard or otherwise, operates in songs three to four minutes in length. "Stairway," as the song is often known, is close to three times as long. This aligns closely with the lengths of songs defining the progressive rock genre.

Similarly aligned with progressive rock is the intellectual nature of the song's lyrics. The very title of the song, which is repeated in the lyrics, is an allusion to the dream-vision of the Biblical Jacob. Another Biblical allusion, if a less-concrete one, is evidenced in the lyric that "There's a sign on the wall," which obliquely references the hand writing on the wall in Daniel. Both serve to ground the song in the prevailing Western intellectual tradition by calling upon long-standing cultural referents. So, too, does the reference in the lyrics to paying the piper; the allusion is to the Pied Piper, a fairy-tale figure associated with the Norse god Odin. The lyrics also invoke contemporary literature; the discussion of longingly looking westward through trees and seeking out a white-light lady evokes images of Galadriel from Tolkien's Middle-earth corpus. In gathering in as wide a spread of material as it does, "Stairway to Heaven" displays a command of cultural referents which speaks to higher intellectual faculties, thus working as progressive rock.

The instrumentation of the song also brings it alongside progressive rock. The opening strains of the song famously employ woodwind instruments--recorders--which is entirely atypical of rock music. Recorders do figure prominently in Renaissance and older musics, however, and those musical styles are often assigned to orchestral ensembles. That "Stairway" uses recorders, then, means it employs orchestral instrumentation, and so is a piece of progressive rock.

Rhythmically, the song also functions as progressive rock. "Stairway" breaks easily into distinct sections. The first is that employing the recorders. At around the time the lyrics offer "You know it makes me wonder," the rhythmic construction shifts to a more typical-for-rock pattern, moving to strummed guitar chords rather than a recorder-accompanied plucked-string line. During this section, the tempo of the song slowly increases, until at around the time the singer sings "If there's a bustle in your hedgerow." At that point, the drummer begins playing in earnest, marking a new section of the song, one more solidly rock in nature; the drums mark out a pattern in four, with continual high-hat punctuated by snare and, less frequently, by bass drum. Afterwards, the song moves into a driving, hard rock passage that culminates in a return to an echoing, almost empty vocal solo.

The rhythmic changes structure the song as a series of short movements, each with a distinct character, but all unified in the presentation of a single theme and variations upon it. The movement structure typifies longer orchestral and symphonic works, but is rare in rock, in which there is seldom time to effectively sub-divide a song in such a manner. As such, "Stairway to Heaven" employs unusual-for-rock rhythmic structures and so, along with the other things it does, presents itself as an example of progressive rock.

That Led Zeppelin's most famous work is an example of progressive rock does not mean that the band as a whole is wrongly-identified as a hard-rock group. Rather, it serves to highlight the band's ability to participate in multiple musical genres. This makes of Led Zeppelin a better band.

Friday, February 4, 2011

In College English 73.3, John Schlib conducts an email interview of David Bartholomae, author of "perhaps the most often cited and discussed essay in composition studies" (260) and so one of the major figures in the field. In the course of the interview, Bartholomae notes that "a certain form of close reading...is the essential lesson for any writer/reader/thinker" (271). He also discusses having created, working with others, "a curriculum where reading and writing assignments were sequenced, so that students worked on a semester-long project" (273).

I like to think that my own composition assignments work in this way. I strive to set things up to promote attention to specific details, which aligns with Bartholomae's claim for close reading. I also have explicitly sequenced assignments so that the first paper, a definition, makes possible the second and third papers (classification and focused comparison/contrast, respectively), and that one of the three early papers becomes the long later paper. It makes of the term a single, extended project, such as that for which Bartholomae calls.

There is validation in having ideas show up in the mouths--or in this case, the inboxes--of major figures in the field.

Work Cited
Bartholomae, David, and John Schlib. "'Inventing the University' at 25: An Interview with David Bartholomae." College English 73.3 (January 2011): 260-82. Print.